Quantitative Proteomic Map of the Trypanosomatid Strigomonas culicis: The Biological Contribution of its Endosymbiotic Bacterium

Strigomonas culicis is a kinetoplastid parasite of insects that maintains a mutualistic association with an intracellular symbiotic bacterium, which is highly integrated into the protist metabolism: it furnishes essential compounds and divides in synchrony with the eukaryotic nucleus. The protist, conversely, can be cured of the endosymbiont, producing an aposymbiotic cell line, which presents a diminished ability to colonize the insect host. This obligatory association can represent an intermediate step of the evolution towards the formation of an organelle, therefore representing an interesting model to understand the symbiogenesis theory. Here, we used shotgun proteomics to compare the S. culicis endosymbiont-containing and aposymbiotic strains, revealing a total of 11,305 peptides, and up to 2,213 proteins (2,029 and 1,452 for wild type and aposymbiotic, respectively). Gene ontology associated to comparative analysis between both strains revealed that the biological processes most affected by the elimination of the symbiont were the amino acid synthesis, as well as protein synthesis and folding. This large-scale comparison of the protein expression in S. culicis marks a step forward in the comprehension of the role of endosymbiotic bacteria in monoxenous trypanosomatid biology, particularly because trypanosomatids expression is mostly post-transcriptionally regulated.